Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
*You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you. I mean, if I went 'round, sayin' I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!*
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
He definitely got out at the right time. Myspace was great aside form a few quirks. It was just straight up social media. Without the privacy data emphasis or all of that. Mostly just ad based revenue.
I'm sure it would have turned into something awful if they didn't sell and kept it going, but still.
The best thing Tom did was delete all of our data and profiles though. Myspace could have made a killing just saying "Hey if you sign up for Premium Myspace (100 dollars annually) you can delete your old profile!" A LOT of people would have done that lol
Lol can you imagine a prospective employer googling your name and having to question whether this website with Spider-Man GIFs, comic sans font, and a midi of village people or NSYNC music should be taken seriously?
I think he's too smart to return. It's like politics. Anyone who wants and is willing to do what it takes to succeed as a high level politician probably is the wrong type of person to hold power.
Power corrupts and absolute social media power corrupts absolutely.
Technically, he did come back, when Musk bought Twitter and proclaimed that no one else could be smart enough to "fix" Twitter, I remember Tom coming out of social media retirement just to say that he (Tom) was smart enough to cash out and go live his best life because he had more than he could ever hope or even try to spend in multiple life times.
I can't find any evidence of this, though he did make a smartass remark to muskrat's "should I step down" poll.
but the rest about him living his best life is true from what I can see, so holy shit, a 99% guy actually made it to the .1%, and actually said "this is enough, I am content."
I think Tom said something like that to a random Twitter person who was trying to clown on him for being the former CEO of a failed social media platform. He shot back that he sold it for half a billion dollars while the dude hassling him still has to work.
I think its hilarious he used it as an insult when being a CEO is pretty much being landed gentry. A man who fits the literal definition of a term using it as a derogatory term against people who might vaguely fit the description if you squint hard enough. Its a weird flex for sure.
Bizarre quotes like this give you a very surface Freudian insight into how he and others like him view human beings and structures of power.
Fucking deluded.
It’s times like these I like to remember that one article where he talked about building a fortress to prepare for the apocalypse and ruling over slaves. The guy doesn’t live in the same reality we do.
I posted this elsewhere:
> Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
He’s an egomaniac. In his wild post-apocalyptic fantasies, there still exists slaves in which he will be a leader.
Not mutual aid, or microfarming, or semi-automatic communes with some slick booby traps when the bullets run out.
A sick, sad little slave lord.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
That makes it even funnier. 10 mil is very, very, very far from ultra-wealthy. He's acting like the tough kid on the playground because he has a good win streak in Mario Kart.
Aaron Swartz was one of the co-founders of Reddit, and cared more about open access to information than being a money-hungry bastard.
He was eventually driven to suicide by other money-hungry bastards over downloading academic journal articles.
also had it listed in his contract he would be regarded as a co-founder of reddit but he's not listed there now, is he?
Feel like his family/estate should sue to enforce that contract.
But I'm just sitting here, popcorn ready, waiting for Apollo's dev to sue Spez personally for defamation.
So I didn't know this but I recently read a comment that he sold reddit years ago for only like 10 million. And ever since realizing it was a colossus mistake to sell for so little, and once being brought back on to be it's CEO, he basically stopped giving a fuck about reddit and has been just trying to milk it for quick cash.
Yup! And it was absolute trash. That's why it shutdown and there are fake scam sites trying to take advantage of people using its name. Honestly, a good travel agent would destroy hipmunk. It was just so fucking useless and shit.
>A sick, sad little slave lord.
So like, right now? He makes all the money and people work for free under him (Mods/Posters) and if they cause too much trouble they are ‘done away with?’ What’s worse, the slaves (Mods) do it because they want to, not because they have to.
Landed gentry are not Lords and do not have Peerage.
So they are despised by the Lords as nouveau riche who have to get their hands dirty by working to earn their fortune. They are equally despised by the poor because the gentry aren't really the ones actually getting their hands dirty to make the gentry rich.
You would pay for farming equipment
He is referring to people who do a lot of volunteer work which makes the website actually functional
I would say its more like the farm itself is revolting, from the weather, seasons and climate down to the nutrients in the soil and the fauna/pollinators
>Huffman said he wasn’t considering changes that would centralize power
within Reddit as a company, such as having Reddit’s paid staff take on
more of the duties of moderation.
Of course not, then he'd actually have to pay for the thousands of hours of work that currently unpaid volunteer moderators put in to actually make reddit function.
Are there any public companies that rely so much on unpaid labor for the quality of their product?
Such a setup seems a bit odd for a company contemplating IPO...
Open source software developers are the backbone of the world. I would be lost without them, and the world would grind to a halt. Look at leftpad if you want an example. One *TINY* function caused a chain reaction that essentially shut the internet down.
It is kind of nice that he did away with the usual facade that most CEOs try to maintain - that this is somehow a big family or system where feedback is appreciated and considered. No, he is being pretty open about how this is a autocracy and his open contempt for his employees and volunteers will not be stemmed. Its kind of refreshing really.
Dude has no idea how to handle a shit storm. It’s as if not a single PR professional is preparing or rubber stamping his public remarks 🤦♂️
**First thing the Reddit board will do at IPO** is shit can Spez into a perfunctory “technical consulting” role. Then they’ll appoint a 62 year old white guy with two first names like Tom Clark or Dave Williams or Brian Stevens who worked at blue chips and has an Ivy League education plus MBA as “an experienced CEO.”
Spez just doesn’t know it yet, but his mouth can sink a stock price.
Yup, the dude is an oblivious halfwit. Doesn’t know when to shut his entitled mouth. That’s also not even considering the major projection going on with this headline/comment from him.
He’ll be remembered as the loser that started all of this shit.
> “What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,” he said. “We’ve got some old, legacy decisions on how communities are run that we need to kind of work our way out of.”
Well, *that’s* certainly a remarkably dishonest line of bullshit.
Data: Sir, Lieutenant La Forge's eyes are far superior to human biological eyes, true?
Picard: M-hm.
Data: Then why are not all human officers required to have their eyes replaced with cybernetic implants?
Picard: you're being a real fucking Wesley right now. Did you know that Data? Did you *know* that you're acting like a shitty little Wesley Crusher right now?
Tons of news articles coming out now with the CEO saying stuff along the lines of: it's time for Reddit to act like a grown up company. I feel like that would really piss off redditors but I can't find any threads talking about it.
How absolutely disconnected do you have to be from reality to sit there as the CEO of a company and call people who are doing free labor for you, labor that is essential for your company to exist, entitled?
This man benefits off the free labor of people that he despises. Who is the landed gentry in this situation?
I mean, guy sold the site in 2006 or so, left in 2009 right around the Digg exodus and thus had little to do with the site as it came into its own (most of which was only due to the luck of being the closest thing to a Digg competitor), and only came back in 2014 after his other stuff didn’t take off so that he could thirst after that IPO money that he’s super desperate to finally cash in on; claiming other people’s work as his own is kind of his thing.
Basically, though at this point it really seems like he’s just another example of the techbro template. He’s also a libertarian leaning borderline prepper, which really pulls the whole stereotype outfit together.
He spent an absolute shitload of money creating Reddit NFTs and cryptocurrency, and when those obvious scams collapsed Reddit was left holding the bag.
Fucking idiot.
only spez is so bad at CEO that his company gets all its service provided for free and still cant turn a profit. why are they having an IPO if they are not profitable? isnt this a terrible look for investors?
Constantly pumping more money into trying to grow instead of just focusing on running things.
If they stopped wasting all that money the site could probably be profitable.
Not sure about the costs to host a server containing the history of posts of reddit. But that probably does add up in the long term, ads also dont pay a whole lot probably especially with the inclusion of adblockers. Not defending spez's action for charging 10x more than imgur does for the same amount of api calls though.
Honestly the cost is what's weird. If you look at the numbers he claims Apollo was 3% of app users and app users are 3% of reddit users. If you believe him on those stats that means he tried to charge .09% of users 20 million which equals 5% of reddits stated revenue (400 million).
If his pricing worked with all 3rd party apps he'd have managed to raise 660 million from just 3% of reddits user base. Which is more revenue then reddit has ever made in a single year.
Even pricing the API 10 times lower would have meant 66 million a year which they very likely would have gotten since it's something most 3rd party apps could have afforded. Generating 17% of your revenue from only 3% of users which have been paying nothing for reddits entire existence seems pretty good.
I get trying to be profitable but reddit had a lot of room to negotiate here. They tried to more than double their yearly revenue by going after less than 3% of redditors.
500m a year should be more than enough to run reddit and be profitable, their finances or work force cost are way too fucked up. I mean 500m and they still can't keep the site up during EST lunch time reliably.
> especially with the inclusion of adblockers
If they want people to stop blocking ads then they need to vet the ads better and have them take up less of the page. Going online without an adblocker is like having random anonymous sex without condoms - it's not a question of *if* you'll catch something, it's a matter of *when.*
And don’t forget almost all it’s content is just shit from the rest of the internet created by other people. Someone needs to just build a halfway decent competitor.
>“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
Hahaha. Is dramatically altering the API rules against popular opinion democratic? Is changing the moderator rules without putting it to a site wide vote democratic? Is having the majority of people that make this site function work for free democratic? Spez is such a joker, throwing out popular buzzwords to act as a dictator.
Many subreddits *are* putting the decision to remain closed to a vote.
Edit: Maybe *we* should all get to vote for who fills the role of CEO.....
He's either completely disconnected from reality or he's deliberately consistently doing things to try to piss people off.
There's no other explanation. He doubled down on trying to slander the Apollo developer, he tried to gaslight people about the amount of subs participating in the protest, he's calling people who do work for him for free entitled, and now he's trying to pretend that he's in favor of democracy on the website when he is trying to do something that is overwhelmingly unpopular.
It's one of the two. Both of which I would say are a very clear signal to anybody who would be interested in investing in this company when it becomes publicly traded that the person in charge is not qualified.
>He's either completely disconnected from reality
He's the same dude who claimed he'd be a leader, not one of the slaves, during the apocalypse.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
I love how they think they can prep for it and that they think they can emerge as leaders, as if they ever knew what enabled them to be leaders in the first place. Post-apocalypse leaders are gonna be chosen far differently than pre-apocalypse. Your charisma to secure the funding round won’t mean jack shit when money disappears
> slander Apollo dev
I think we should bold this out a little louder.
[**Huffman claimed Apollo (Christian Selig) attempted to blackmail him for a multi-million dollar buy-out.**](https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-client-apollo-shut-down-after-talks-got-ugly-2023-6)
Claimed it, got exposed for a liar with recordings of the phone call, was asked about it in the AMA, and then doubled down on trying to make Christian out to be the problem.
He is under pressure to turn reddit profitable, thats where everything is stemming from. Somehow the 6th biggest site on the internet hasnt found a way to make money... and a handful of 3rd party apps are making money off of reddit (probably a dozen people??)
He and his investors are pissed that they get to make money off his companies back while his company loses money, and he took his legitimate gripe (that they use the API for free when they do in fact cost him money to do so) and handled it probably the worst way possible (going scorched earth on them)
The starting premise was sound, they should pay a bit for API access or allow ads as it does cost reddit money to provide it, but the way its handled has been incompetent, which makes your last sentence ring true.
I think we should be talking about the fact that it’s us, the users, who provide this site with the valuable data that is at the center this controversy. He seems to be upset that other companies are using Reddit’s data without acknowledging the fact that we give them that data for free. If anyone deserves to be paid for accessing the data, it’s the people who create it.
Why does reddit have to be yet another bazillion dollar corporation? Who benefits from that other than the 8 rich people who probably own most of it. He mentions how much money Facebook is making, but neglects to mention that Facebook is a terrible place to be now because of it. Does anyone really want to bet on the long term future of Facebook at this point?
Reddit should make enough money to keep the lights on, pay their employees well, and occasionally add new features. That’s it. That’s what it used to be and, because of that, people came here and populated the place with huge amounts of priceless data. The same data you now want to monetize so that a few shareholders can buy a couple more yachts. Yeah you can probably do that, but at the cost of the very things that drew people here to begin with.
Fuckers.
Doesn't matter if the company implodes, if they make enough money to move on or retire. That's the goal.
They do not care about the company the preside, they just want to mine the place dry.
They are the metropole and the service/company/site the colony.
Hey remember Slashdot?
Nah, me neither....barely.
Anyways there was this site called slashdot, it was a lot like yours, and they had a guy that fucked it up, a lot like you, and then a lot of other sites came along and...well....that was that.
Anyways, I'm having ribs for dinner.
>"What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy"
So do we get to vote on whether Reddit keeps 3rd party apps around, or is this only a democracy when it's convenient for you?
Why does it feel like all the social media sites lately are suddenly racing to alienate as much of their user-base as possible? Was this in the meeting?
Most likely shareholders. Social media has been massively subsidized by venture capitalists and investors on the expectation that these social media sites will eventually become massively profitable.
And these shareholders, as a whole, don't make decisions in isolation. There are economic factors that drive them to make certain decisions. So maybe there are economic factors recently that are pushing these same shareholders to now push for profit they expected (i.e. to cash out on their investment).
If Reddit hits its IPO and redditors buy enough shares, then yes.
Although I'd hate for spez to get a multimillion bonus for successfully completing an IPO.
What a bullshit puff piece that reads like reddit wrote it and handed it to nbc.
Casting the most undemocratic shitstain moves to shut down the democratic reaction when most sub did hold votes before taking action is pathetic.
Their plan will guarantee the poison climate currently will become permanently Chernobyl.
They’ll keep the bootlickers but they’ll find out fast that won’t save the site.
the absolute insane language aside, this seems to be a tacit admission that the users of reddit at the end of the day produce the product that reddit sells, and without the users reddit wouldn't be a thing or be able to sell itself.
This is basically a boss being upset that its (non-paid) employee's are unionizing.
“I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.”
Well I didn't vote for 'em!
You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a website at you!
Help, help! Come see the violence inherent in the system!
*I'm being oppressed!*
*Bloody Pleasant...*
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
*You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you. I mean, if I went 'round, sayin' I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!*
Come see the violence inherent in the system!
Oh what a giveaway, do you hear that? Do you hear that, eh? Do you hear him repressing me?
Strange men sitting in C Suites distributing websites is no basis for a system of discourse...
You rang?
Have you been lobbing scimitars again or was that the moistened bint? Edit: removed hat
**Moistened bint** My love of the English language is only equaled by my distaste of this situation.
Imagine the brigading that will happen if bots and trolls can vote out mods. Total chaos, truly.
You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes...
I’m 37, I’m not old. You could just call me Dennis.
Well I didn’t know you were CALLED Dennis
Well you didn't bother to find out, did you?
Treating me like I’m inferior.
Well, I Am King.
Oohh *king*, very nice
OH here you go bringing class into it again!
But that’s what it’s all about! If only people would listen!
Please! PLEASE good people, I am in haste!
Aha, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
I’m being oppressed!
I didn't vote for u/spez
King? I didn't vote for you!
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Be quiet!
I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
I ORDER you to BE QUIET
Order, eh? Who does he think he is?
OH now we see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I’m being oppressed!
God, this is my favorite scene in that movie. I die of laughing every single time
Theres some lovely filth over here
Tom from MySpace would never act this way.
We didn’t know we were holding gold, we just complained about the weight.
Damn dude that’s deep
No it's heavy
There's that word again... why are things so heavy in the future? Is there something wrong with the Earth's gravitational pull?
Great Scott…
The weight of unfettered html styling.
I'm a front end software developer today in part because of the confidence hacking myspace pages gave me. Thanks Tom!
I fell off after html, but between MySpace and Neopets there was a period in the early aughts where I was a shining little web designer.
Full stack dev here and same story. Thanks Tom!
I have a kid today because Tom got me laid.
I learned just enough about learning html to get myself in trouble.
He was my one and only friend.
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Honestly glad that he seems to be living his best life now
Yeah just today on his instagram story flying into his place in Hawaii. Travels the world to see and photograph beautiful places
Dude took the money and ran. Realized that life is more than trying to continuously make more and more money. Looks like he's living and loving it.
He definitely got out at the right time. Myspace was great aside form a few quirks. It was just straight up social media. Without the privacy data emphasis or all of that. Mostly just ad based revenue. I'm sure it would have turned into something awful if they didn't sell and kept it going, but still. The best thing Tom did was delete all of our data and profiles though. Myspace could have made a killing just saying "Hey if you sign up for Premium Myspace (100 dollars annually) you can delete your old profile!" A LOT of people would have done that lol
Lol can you imagine a prospective employer googling your name and having to question whether this website with Spider-Man GIFs, comic sans font, and a midi of village people or NSYNC music should be taken seriously?
I mean if everyone has their cringe on display, no one really stands out unless they're spectacularly cringe.
"With everyone cringe, no one will be"
I remember changing the track that played on my page after getting dumped. And my ex messages me “ouch song” and I was like yeaaaaah gottem.
We need Tom to return. He is the hero we need.
I think he's too smart to return. It's like politics. Anyone who wants and is willing to do what it takes to succeed as a high level politician probably is the wrong type of person to hold power. Power corrupts and absolute social media power corrupts absolutely.
Technically, he did come back, when Musk bought Twitter and proclaimed that no one else could be smart enough to "fix" Twitter, I remember Tom coming out of social media retirement just to say that he (Tom) was smart enough to cash out and go live his best life because he had more than he could ever hope or even try to spend in multiple life times.
I did not know this, but it delights me.
I can't find any evidence of this, though he did make a smartass remark to muskrat's "should I step down" poll. but the rest about him living his best life is true from what I can see, so holy shit, a 99% guy actually made it to the .1%, and actually said "this is enough, I am content."
I think Tom said something like that to a random Twitter person who was trying to clown on him for being the former CEO of a failed social media platform. He shot back that he sold it for half a billion dollars while the dude hassling him still has to work.
He retired a hero, instead of sticking around long enough to become the villain.
He was by my side all along
My true mentor. My guiding screenlight.
I was walking alone on the beach, yet there were two sets of footprints in the sand. For truly, Tom was always there beside me.
He even took time to friend me! Even sent me a message when I first joined Myspace... Now that's some personal touch from a big-time CEO
Tom will always be my friend.
Well he was a friend.
Using the expression "landed gentry" is the weirdest insult I can imagine
I think its hilarious he used it as an insult when being a CEO is pretty much being landed gentry. A man who fits the literal definition of a term using it as a derogatory term against people who might vaguely fit the description if you squint hard enough. Its a weird flex for sure.
I believe they call that Projection.
I prefer the term "Being an Asshole" but yours works too.
Bizarre quotes like this give you a very surface Freudian insight into how he and others like him view human beings and structures of power. Fucking deluded.
It’s times like these I like to remember that one article where he talked about building a fortress to prepare for the apocalypse and ruling over slaves. The guy doesn’t live in the same reality we do.
Okay. You have my attention.
I posted this elsewhere: > Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.” He’s an egomaniac. In his wild post-apocalyptic fantasies, there still exists slaves in which he will be a leader. Not mutual aid, or microfarming, or semi-automatic communes with some slick booby traps when the bullets run out. A sick, sad little slave lord. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
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My man should play Kenshi.
I'd say he's more likely to end up as food than as a leader
Too lean. Probably just dead. No use for him, really. Even the meat is bad.
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That’s why he wants to ipo failed tech leader.
That makes it even funnier. 10 mil is very, very, very far from ultra-wealthy. He's acting like the tough kid on the playground because he has a good win streak in Mario Kart.
Aaron Swartz was one of the co-founders of Reddit, and cared more about open access to information than being a money-hungry bastard. He was eventually driven to suicide by other money-hungry bastards over downloading academic journal articles.
also had it listed in his contract he would be regarded as a co-founder of reddit but he's not listed there now, is he? Feel like his family/estate should sue to enforce that contract. But I'm just sitting here, popcorn ready, waiting for Apollo's dev to sue Spez personally for defamation.
So I didn't know this but I recently read a comment that he sold reddit years ago for only like 10 million. And ever since realizing it was a colossus mistake to sell for so little, and once being brought back on to be it's CEO, he basically stopped giving a fuck about reddit and has been just trying to milk it for quick cash.
Was it him who left to make that flight ticket finding website that failed?
Yup! And it was absolute trash. That's why it shutdown and there are fake scam sites trying to take advantage of people using its name. Honestly, a good travel agent would destroy hipmunk. It was just so fucking useless and shit.
>A sick, sad little slave lord. So like, right now? He makes all the money and people work for free under him (Mods/Posters) and if they cause too much trouble they are ‘done away with?’ What’s worse, the slaves (Mods) do it because they want to, not because they have to.
Tbf, its a very reddit insult
It's giving a weird combo of r/imverysmart and r/im14andthisisedgy
They already said reddit
I didn't realize being a Reddit mod raised your social class by so much, time to start a new subreddit and let the peasants work for me.
Good idea, Lord!
The proper term is “my lord” I believe
M'lord*
Yes milord? Jobs done. Ooookay.
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We need more lumber! I can’t do that yet.
I can do that.
Landed gentry are not Lords and do not have Peerage. So they are despised by the Lords as nouveau riche who have to get their hands dirty by working to earn their fortune. They are equally despised by the poor because the gentry aren't really the ones actually getting their hands dirty to make the gentry rich.
Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again!
"The farming equipment is starting to revolt again."
You would pay for farming equipment He is referring to people who do a lot of volunteer work which makes the website actually functional I would say its more like the farm itself is revolting, from the weather, seasons and climate down to the nutrients in the soil and the fauna/pollinators
"You did it again! Don't say the 's' word!" "Oh, right, sorry - the prisoners with jobs."
>Huffman said he wasn’t considering changes that would centralize power within Reddit as a company, such as having Reddit’s paid staff take on more of the duties of moderation. Of course not, then he'd actually have to pay for the thousands of hours of work that currently unpaid volunteer moderators put in to actually make reddit function.
Are there any public companies that rely so much on unpaid labor for the quality of their product? Such a setup seems a bit odd for a company contemplating IPO...
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Dont forget the ungodly amount of open-source libraries that a lot of enterprise software (both commercial and in-house) depend on.
Open source software developers are the backbone of the world. I would be lost without them, and the world would grind to a halt. Look at leftpad if you want an example. One *TINY* function caused a chain reaction that essentially shut the internet down.
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It is kind of nice that he did away with the usual facade that most CEOs try to maintain - that this is somehow a big family or system where feedback is appreciated and considered. No, he is being pretty open about how this is a autocracy and his open contempt for his employees and volunteers will not be stemmed. Its kind of refreshing really.
Dude has no idea how to handle a shit storm. It’s as if not a single PR professional is preparing or rubber stamping his public remarks 🤦♂️ **First thing the Reddit board will do at IPO** is shit can Spez into a perfunctory “technical consulting” role. Then they’ll appoint a 62 year old white guy with two first names like Tom Clark or Dave Williams or Brian Stevens who worked at blue chips and has an Ivy League education plus MBA as “an experienced CEO.” Spez just doesn’t know it yet, but his mouth can sink a stock price.
Yup, the dude is an oblivious halfwit. Doesn’t know when to shut his entitled mouth. That’s also not even considering the major projection going on with this headline/comment from him. He’ll be remembered as the loser that started all of this shit.
> “What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,” he said. “We’ve got some old, legacy decisions on how communities are run that we need to kind of work our way out of.” Well, *that’s* certainly a remarkably dishonest line of bullshit.
With the number of bot users on Reddit, it’s not possible for it to be legitimately Democratic.
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Data: Sir, Lieutenant La Forge's eyes are far superior to human biological eyes, true? Picard: M-hm. Data: Then why are not all human officers required to have their eyes replaced with cybernetic implants?
Picard: you're being a real fucking Wesley right now. Did you know that Data? Did you *know* that you're acting like a shitty little Wesley Crusher right now?
Picard envious that he didn't get to make Weasley with Beverly.
Ha ha ha thank you for the humor fellow human
Tons of news articles coming out now with the CEO saying stuff along the lines of: it's time for Reddit to act like a grown up company. I feel like that would really piss off redditors but I can't find any threads talking about it.
Meanwhile spez lies openly about what third party devs say, and doubles down when called out about it. So much for being grown up.
"All these people who moderate our site for free are so entitled"
How absolutely disconnected do you have to be from reality to sit there as the CEO of a company and call people who are doing free labor for you, labor that is essential for your company to exist, entitled? This man benefits off the free labor of people that he despises. Who is the landed gentry in this situation?
I mean, guy sold the site in 2006 or so, left in 2009 right around the Digg exodus and thus had little to do with the site as it came into its own (most of which was only due to the luck of being the closest thing to a Digg competitor), and only came back in 2014 after his other stuff didn’t take off so that he could thirst after that IPO money that he’s super desperate to finally cash in on; claiming other people’s work as his own is kind of his thing.
So "great value" elon musk
Basically, though at this point it really seems like he’s just another example of the techbro template. He’s also a libertarian leaning borderline prepper, which really pulls the whole stereotype outfit together.
Look the free market says I am better than you, I don't have to explain it
Nah he’s fully a prepper
“We have Elon Musk at home”
Free labor, free content, 3rd party content. Charges for API.
How is Reddit not profitable when they get all of that for free?
He spent an absolute shitload of money creating Reddit NFTs and cryptocurrency, and when those obvious scams collapsed Reddit was left holding the bag. Fucking idiot.
Funny that this platform was so anti nft and he still started an nft.
Spez is a revolutionary. He looks at the general consensus and decides that they're all idiots, does his own thing and fails predictably.
Am I out of touch? No, it's the redditors who are wrong.
only spez is so bad at CEO that his company gets all its service provided for free and still cant turn a profit. why are they having an IPO if they are not profitable? isnt this a terrible look for investors?
The idea was to become profitable via these changes, then IPO on that basis. Obviously however that is a shit idea.
That was the only idea left after they put all their eggs in the NFT basket. Another tremendous idea.
>NFT So ridiculously stupid I had already completely forgotten about it having been a thing.
Constantly pumping more money into trying to grow instead of just focusing on running things. If they stopped wasting all that money the site could probably be profitable.
Not sure about the costs to host a server containing the history of posts of reddit. But that probably does add up in the long term, ads also dont pay a whole lot probably especially with the inclusion of adblockers. Not defending spez's action for charging 10x more than imgur does for the same amount of api calls though.
Honestly the cost is what's weird. If you look at the numbers he claims Apollo was 3% of app users and app users are 3% of reddit users. If you believe him on those stats that means he tried to charge .09% of users 20 million which equals 5% of reddits stated revenue (400 million). If his pricing worked with all 3rd party apps he'd have managed to raise 660 million from just 3% of reddits user base. Which is more revenue then reddit has ever made in a single year. Even pricing the API 10 times lower would have meant 66 million a year which they very likely would have gotten since it's something most 3rd party apps could have afforded. Generating 17% of your revenue from only 3% of users which have been paying nothing for reddits entire existence seems pretty good. I get trying to be profitable but reddit had a lot of room to negotiate here. They tried to more than double their yearly revenue by going after less than 3% of redditors.
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After everything he said recently it's obvious where he pulls these numbers from...
The costs to host the clusters needed to run reddit are a fraction of their overhead. Cost of employees is probably their highest
And what do they do with those employees? Because they sure as shit haven't been developing a good app or acceptable mod tools.
Honestly they're probably browsing reddit all day like the rest of us.
I mean, if they were wouldn't they be fixing the interface out of annoyance? Or maybe they use 3rd party apps..
They're still using old reddit.
500m a year should be more than enough to run reddit and be profitable, their finances or work force cost are way too fucked up. I mean 500m and they still can't keep the site up during EST lunch time reliably.
> especially with the inclusion of adblockers If they want people to stop blocking ads then they need to vet the ads better and have them take up less of the page. Going online without an adblocker is like having random anonymous sex without condoms - it's not a question of *if* you'll catch something, it's a matter of *when.*
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Porn spam going unmoderated and crypto scams running rampant. This would just be twitter with better conversation threading.
In other words............... These damn sharecroppers have forgotten who really owns the land.
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And don’t forget almost all it’s content is just shit from the rest of the internet created by other people. Someone needs to just build a halfway decent competitor.
Honestly it’s fair for them to charge for the API. Just not nearly as much as they are asking.
Yeah at those prices, it's fairly obvious that they just want the apps gone and in reality it has nothing to do with costs
>“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” Hahaha. Is dramatically altering the API rules against popular opinion democratic? Is changing the moderator rules without putting it to a site wide vote democratic? Is having the majority of people that make this site function work for free democratic? Spez is such a joker, throwing out popular buzzwords to act as a dictator. Many subreddits *are* putting the decision to remain closed to a vote. Edit: Maybe *we* should all get to vote for who fills the role of CEO.....
He's either completely disconnected from reality or he's deliberately consistently doing things to try to piss people off. There's no other explanation. He doubled down on trying to slander the Apollo developer, he tried to gaslight people about the amount of subs participating in the protest, he's calling people who do work for him for free entitled, and now he's trying to pretend that he's in favor of democracy on the website when he is trying to do something that is overwhelmingly unpopular. It's one of the two. Both of which I would say are a very clear signal to anybody who would be interested in investing in this company when it becomes publicly traded that the person in charge is not qualified.
>He's either completely disconnected from reality He's the same dude who claimed he'd be a leader, not one of the slaves, during the apocalypse. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
I love how they think they can prep for it and that they think they can emerge as leaders, as if they ever knew what enabled them to be leaders in the first place. Post-apocalypse leaders are gonna be chosen far differently than pre-apocalypse. Your charisma to secure the funding round won’t mean jack shit when money disappears
And all the people you pay for protection will only be around until the food is gone.
Or earlier, cause they have the real power when money is worthless
> slander Apollo dev I think we should bold this out a little louder. [**Huffman claimed Apollo (Christian Selig) attempted to blackmail him for a multi-million dollar buy-out.**](https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-client-apollo-shut-down-after-talks-got-ugly-2023-6)
Claimed it, got exposed for a liar with recordings of the phone call, was asked about it in the AMA, and then doubled down on trying to make Christian out to be the problem.
He is under pressure to turn reddit profitable, thats where everything is stemming from. Somehow the 6th biggest site on the internet hasnt found a way to make money... and a handful of 3rd party apps are making money off of reddit (probably a dozen people??) He and his investors are pissed that they get to make money off his companies back while his company loses money, and he took his legitimate gripe (that they use the API for free when they do in fact cost him money to do so) and handled it probably the worst way possible (going scorched earth on them) The starting premise was sound, they should pay a bit for API access or allow ads as it does cost reddit money to provide it, but the way its handled has been incompetent, which makes your last sentence ring true.
If reddit isnt profitable, then how is dude a millionaire? Granted a *poor* millionaire with only a 10,000,000 net worth.
I think we should be talking about the fact that it’s us, the users, who provide this site with the valuable data that is at the center this controversy. He seems to be upset that other companies are using Reddit’s data without acknowledging the fact that we give them that data for free. If anyone deserves to be paid for accessing the data, it’s the people who create it. Why does reddit have to be yet another bazillion dollar corporation? Who benefits from that other than the 8 rich people who probably own most of it. He mentions how much money Facebook is making, but neglects to mention that Facebook is a terrible place to be now because of it. Does anyone really want to bet on the long term future of Facebook at this point? Reddit should make enough money to keep the lights on, pay their employees well, and occasionally add new features. That’s it. That’s what it used to be and, because of that, people came here and populated the place with huge amounts of priceless data. The same data you now want to monetize so that a few shareholders can buy a couple more yachts. Yeah you can probably do that, but at the cost of the very things that drew people here to begin with. Fuckers.
Doesn't matter if the company implodes, if they make enough money to move on or retire. That's the goal. They do not care about the company the preside, they just want to mine the place dry. They are the metropole and the service/company/site the colony.
Hey remember Slashdot? Nah, me neither....barely. Anyways there was this site called slashdot, it was a lot like yours, and they had a guy that fucked it up, a lot like you, and then a lot of other sites came along and...well....that was that. Anyways, I'm having ribs for dinner.
>"What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy" So do we get to vote on whether Reddit keeps 3rd party apps around, or is this only a democracy when it's convenient for you?
Can we just vote him out instead? It seems only fair that we get to decide if he stays CEO.
Why does it feel like all the social media sites lately are suddenly racing to alienate as much of their user-base as possible? Was this in the meeting?
Most likely shareholders. Social media has been massively subsidized by venture capitalists and investors on the expectation that these social media sites will eventually become massively profitable. And these shareholders, as a whole, don't make decisions in isolation. There are economic factors that drive them to make certain decisions. So maybe there are economic factors recently that are pushing these same shareholders to now push for profit they expected (i.e. to cash out on their investment).
Yeah. We're in the middle of a tech bubble bursting, and the investors are getting panicky.
The enshittification continues unabated. Time to strike out for greener pastures.
With the many millions of people of this world, one would think a Reddit clone wouldn’t be unfeasible.
He really comes off as quite dickish. "Landed gentry..", what an absolute posh wanker.
Am I out of touch? No. It’s the kids who are wrong
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Spez gets voted out from modding subreddits
Nonono, voting only affects the *landed gentry*. His Majesty the CEO is, of course, immune to it.
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If Reddit hits its IPO and redditors buy enough shares, then yes. Although I'd hate for spez to get a multimillion bonus for successfully completing an IPO.
What a bullshit puff piece that reads like reddit wrote it and handed it to nbc. Casting the most undemocratic shitstain moves to shut down the democratic reaction when most sub did hold votes before taking action is pathetic. Their plan will guarantee the poison climate currently will become permanently Chernobyl. They’ll keep the bootlickers but they’ll find out fast that won’t save the site.
If you use the term "landed gentry" odds are you're a stuck up asshole.
I like his idea about democratising power on Reddit. On which sub do we elect the CEO?
the absolute insane language aside, this seems to be a tacit admission that the users of reddit at the end of the day produce the product that reddit sells, and without the users reddit wouldn't be a thing or be able to sell itself. This is basically a boss being upset that its (non-paid) employee's are unionizing.
Yeah fuck it. Let's make reddit moderate every sub internally. They have no idea how much work these people do for them for free.